Celebrity and Collective Action: How (Not) to Sustain a Resilient Movement

Celebrity and Collective Action: How (Not) to Sustain a Resilient Movement

By: Audrin Thorn, Jamie Sayegh, and Kenzi Garner

 

In the Raíces Verdes podcast episode “Black Environmentalism and Settler Colonial Education,” Samara Almonte (host) and Ashley Arhin discuss, among  multifarious other issues, the problem of celebrity within social justice movements.  Social and environmental justice movements can be distracted and damaged by  individuals commanding the limelight or performative action capitalizing on a “woke”  profit niche.  

There is a certain logic or appeal to celebrity status: fame can help spread  awareness and garner support for a cause. People generally gravitate to personalities,  and many celebrities intentionally cultivate parasocial relationships with their fans. The way we shape the histories of social change center charismatic leaders. Most children learn about Martin Luther King Jr. in elementary school as though he were responsible  for the end of racism. The broader coalition of groups and individuals that comprised the  Civil Rights Movement are downplayed or left out of the story.  

Greta Thunberg is a contemporary example of a celebrity within the  environmental movement: Greta’s story was shared globally on the news and on social  media. She toured across the world and spoke to presidents, prime ministers, and in  front of the UN. In 2019, I attended a massive rally in Vancouver featuring numerous  local Indigenous leaders to talk about environmental destruction disproportionately  impacting Indigenous communities, with Greta there to support their message. As the  local leaders talked, people in the crowd started chanting for Greta to speak. Clearly  many in the crowd had come to see the young celebrity, rather than to rally behind the  elders. The rally had become a rock concert. 

Celebrity status is not always sought out, but can be ascribed by a collective  tendency to place people on pedestals. When a movement centers around a single  person or a small group of people, rather than a collective movement or cause, the  failures of the celebrity become the failures of the movement. Individuals burn out and  

can have problematic ideologies and/or past behavior that comes to back to discredit  them. They can die or get sick, be incarcerated, or otherwise have their celebrity status  withdrawn, diminished, or collapsed. If a movement is too centered around an individual  celebrity, then that movement flounders without them.  

The culture of glorifying celebrities, glorifying individuals, can incentivize merely  performative change. For example, after Colin Kaepernick knelt for the national anthem  to protest police brutality, Nike ran an ad featuring him to promote their brand; Kaepernick’s resistance was commodified and diluted by corporations looking to  capitalize on the aesthetic of social change. Glorification of celebrity can also lead to  individuals performing “wokeness,” without substantive, collective action to promote  social and environmental justice, or to undo their own internal biases.  

Movements which are collective, grassroots, and not organized around a singular  leader, are far more resilient and flexible to changing circumstances according to  Adrienne Maree Brown in Emergent Strategy. Examples of groups and coalitions  working towards social justice, without depending on celebrity status, include  decentralized Wet’suwet’en activists, Keystone and Dakota Access Pipeline water  protectors, and localized movements like Eastyard Collective in Los Angeles. When  some individuals need to step back, others step up to continue carrying the work  forward and the movement is sustained.  

The power behind movements is in the people that comprise them, and we must  each make the choice to empower ourselves and each other in leadership that is not  above, but part of, the movement.

 

“Black Environmentalism and Settler-Colonial Education” 

https://open.spotify.com/episode/1jFOh75Y4bYZI3Uor9NLBV?si=akYU7YjHQISHYGZd E7H6SQ 

Raices Verdes Podcast 

https://open.spotify.com/show/2Swg5aSlcR00cnnvbrAiaM?si=nO0I16Q1Ra-ofiXshK8- NQ 

Creator’s Instagram 

https://www.instagram.com/nuestrasraicesverdes/ 

Emergent Strategy 

brown, adrienne m. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. , 2017.  Print